CPUK
statement of support and solidarity with the people of Gaza
(2009).

Community
Psychologists in the UK (CPUK) extend their support for and
solidarity to the people of Gaza. We are calling upon the British
government and the British people to take all feasible steps,
beginning with immediate boycotts, divestments and sanctions against
the state of Israel, to oblige Israel's political administration to:
abide by international law; dismantle its apartheid regime spanning
both the occupied territories and Israel; immediately and
unconditionally end its assault on Gaza; end the occupation of the
West Bank; abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond
its 1967 borders; and commit to pursuing a long-lasting, just
peace.

CPUK
denounces as war crimes and crimes against humanity the
disproportionality of Israel's attacks on Gaza, which includes the
indiscriminate killing of men, women and children. The Israeli
Defense Force deliberately: targets hospitals, civilian shelters and
prevents medical aid reaching the injured and medical supplies and
equipment from entering the Gaza Strip; uses white phosphorous
munitions in civilian areas; and destroys Gaza's infrastructure of
roads, water supplies, sanitation, food production, food
distribution, food security, electricity, social services, education
services, health services, law and order, housing, environmental
services, and broader social support structures. These actions
suggest the Israeli political administration's has genocidal
intentions towards the people of Palestine.

The massacre of
civilians in Gaza is the latest phase of a war that successive
governments of Israel (supported by the USA and Britain) have been
waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The
goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military
power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force capable of
resisting Israel's ongoing appropriation of Palestinian land and
resources. CPUK believes that for the sake of justice and global
peace, th Israeli State must not be allowed to achieve this. Our
belief in the right of the Palestinians to democratic
self-determination, and to resist military aggression and colonial
occupation, obligates us to take the side of the people of Gaza and
the West Bank and to side against Israel.

Press
Release from The UK Community Psychology Network on Cognitive
Behaviour Therapy

For
immediate release
16 October 2007

Changing
politicians' minds about changing our minds?

"Cognitive
Behaviour Therapy and associated approaches are comprehensively
problematic. Primary prevention is the only way to
substantially reduce socially, economically and materially caused
distress. To be effective primary prevention must involve
social rather than cognitive change. Reducing income inequality
in our society would be one of the most effective ways to reduce
psychological distress and ill health”, says the UK Community
Psychology Network.

"As
community and critical psychologists we believe that psychologists
have a fundamental responsibility to join with others to end both
poverty and societal inequality independent of absolute wealth, which
we believe are personally, collectively and socially destructive.

We believe mainstream psychology to be complicit with the
prevailing psychologically toxic neo-liberal economic order and
believe psychology has allowed itself to be used to hide systemic
effects of poverty and inequality and instead position poverty as a
consequence of individual psychological dysfunction.

We
call for the radical transformation of psychology so that it has the
resources necessary to expose the personally, collectively and
socially destructive effects of poverty and inequality and the
proactive deployment, with allies, of this transformed psychology to
end poverty and societal inequality and the exploitation, exclusion,
oppression, distress and illness which result from them."